


Meet Cute

by Cluegirl



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M, Mild Angst, PTSD, Soulbond AU, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, steve is Not Okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:51:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3287552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Romantic as it might seem to wear the first words of your soulmate across your skin all your life, the sad truth is that not all soul bonds involve a happily ever after.</p><p>Some of them don't even involve the happily part.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meet Cute

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shankyknitter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shankyknitter/gifts).



> This work was posted free of charge at archiveofourown.org. Readers are welcome to download this work from AO3 **for their own personal and private use** , but if you are reading it on a site you must pay to access, then you are being robbed, and so am I. Please exit the site and go to archiveofourown.org, where you can find this and the rest of my derivative works under the handle of Cluegirl.

Meet Cute

Grudgingly, and with the poorest grace imaginable, Steve allowed himself to be dragged back to New York City in late January. He abandoned Bucky's breadcrumb trail of dead operatives and burnt out HYDRA installations at the Ukrainian border, allowed Sam and Stark and Hill to wheedle him out of marching straight into an active war zone in which the US had no official stake, but in which Captain America being spotted could land a whole lot of people in a whole lot more danger than Captain America could possibly help them back out of again.

A year ago, he wouldn't have done it. 

A year ago, he'd have pulled a ball cap down low, ditched Sam somewhere safe, squared his jaw, and shown his finger to the world for thinking it could tell him what to do. But the fall of SHIELD had taught Steve this much, at least -- that evil men would turn the very best of your intentions into just another bloodbath if you gave them so much as half a chance. And like it or not, Captain America was a loaded symbol, one which just about everyone in the world had a spin on. Cap was bigger than Steve and Bucky, and everything they'd ever thought they'd know. And anyhow, there'd always been places Bucky could go, where Steve couldn't follow, hadn't there? 

It was something of a relief when Stark's private jet landed at the airfield outside Minsk with only Clint and Natasha onboard. Steve hadn't been too sure he could look at Tony's inevitable 'I-told-you-you'd-never-find-him-without-my-help' face without needing to put his knuckles into it -- not without a hot meal and a good bit of sleep to take the sting out of quitting first.

So he didn't put up a fuss when Natasha collared him over to one of the plane's sofas and waited in companionable silence until he'd got two steak dinners and a half a cheesecake into him. Then she nudged him over into a comfortable sprawl, tucked herself against his side, and declared that they both needed a nap. She was right, anyhow, and he'd missed the comfortable, innocent intimacy with her more than he'd been ready to admit. Sam was a good friend and a great ally, but Riley was still an aching presence in Sam's eyes, and a nearly-invisible scrawl of wordscar across his left forearm, and Steve knew too well how much space ghosts like that could take up. 

Natasha had no ghosts of which she was aware. She'd taken care to tell Steve so when they'd begun to work together, train together, and sleep -- just sleep -- together. When she'd begun to chip away at his loneliness with innocent and devastating persistence, and to dig him out of the numbed scars of his past, she'd made sure he knew that Natasha Romanov was her own in every way, with no soulmate, nobody's words etched into her porcelain skin, and nobody's life entangled with her own. She was safe, she was free to choose what she wanted from whom, and to change her mind at will, and Steve never planned to tell her just how much he envied her that. 

Twelve hours, a continent, and half an ocean later, Steve woke up again. He was alone on the sofa, tucked up tight against the cushions, with a cashmere throw draped over him and a cup of water set just within reach on the floor. Clint and Sam were picking over the bar, jostling each other like rowdy kids as they inspected Stark's liquor supply and found it wanting.

"How the hell can there be no beer?" Sam wanted to know. "I thought Stark was supposed to be a partyboy."

"Wait till you see him do a keg stand with 18 year old scotch," Clint smirked back, cracking open a coke and grabbing two lowball glasses. "Pass me that bourbon." Steve watched his eyes narrow, tracking Sam's inner wrist as he did so, and his belly clenched tight, willing Clint not to say anything, not to see it, not to ask... 

"Look out, asshole?"

Sam froze, breath and all, as if he'd forgot which one of them was alive still. Then, with a shiver, he found a hollow smile and shrugged. "Me and Riley met in training," he said, looking down at the faint, silvery scar that anybody could see now if they looked for it. "Para-rescue, with the Falcon EXO units back when they were still prototypes. There might have been some Newton's third law involved."

For a long beat, there was silence, each of them thinking of what it took to turn a soulmate's elusive, will-o-wisp script into scar tissue. Then Clint was yanking his shirt up over his head and turning to show the high line of his ribs to Sam, half contrite, half defiant. Steve watched Sam bend and peer, and told himself to breathe.

"I really wouldn't advise that." Sam read slowly, a grin spreading slowly across his face. "I'm guessing there's a story."

"Oh, there's about a hundred stories, but most of them are classified," Clint shrugged with a grin. "I could tell you, but then I'd have to..."

"Yeah, with you ex SHIELD types, that joke ain't _even_ funny," Sam groused, sloshing bourbon into the glasses. "So where is he now?"

"That one _is_ classified," Clint came back, portioning out the coke. "Even from me."

"Man. That's harsh," Sam observed. "I take it he's another agent?"

Clint nodded. "Used to be. But then he supposedly died, and I have no fucking idea what his activation status is now. You want anything, Steve?" he called, taking up his drink and heading toward the couches.

Quelling his inward wince at having been caught, Steve sat up. "Just a coke's fine," he said, then plucked the can from the air as Sam slung it at him. "Where's Natasha?"

"Gossiping with Jarvis in the cockpit," Clint said, not bothering to put his shirt back on as he plopped down across from Steve and put his boots on the low table. The faint letters peeked out from under his arm, glimmering faintly, like a heat mirage over bronze-tanned skin, and as the look in Clint's grey eyes dared him to look his fill of the soulmark while it was on display, Steve did.

"That's Phil Coulson's hand, isn't it?" he asked after a painfully silent moment, and a series of logical conclusions that burned more than they probably ought to have done, all things considered. 

"Yep," Clint nodded, and rubbed one hand along the words as if they ached. "Scarred up for a couple of days after Manhattan, and I thought that was that. But apparently my bastard soulmate's just too stubborn to die. Which'll make it more fun when I catch up to his ass and shoot him for ditching me without a word for three years."

"Not if I catch up to him first," Natasha said, slinking out of the cockpit like a very unimpressed shadow. 

"What?" she asked, noting Steve's look of surprise as she sat down beside him, "Soulbonds are rare, the three of you notwithstanding. I might not have a bond mark myself, but at least I respect them. And the people who have them." She leaned forward to swipe Clint's drink off the table, and nudged Steve so casually with her knee that Steve almost didn't notice the touch.

But Sam did, and when the penny dropped, he looked appalled. "Aw, shit, Steve." 

He winced, shaking his head. "It's okay, Sam."

"Naw, man, it really ain't," Sam rubbed at his scars with a restless hand. "I'd known you lost your bondmate to the ice, I wouldn't have spent the last six months flaunting my damage out where you-"

"I didn't." It was rude, the snap in Steve's voice, and he knew it, but he couldn't bear another word of the apology, didn't want to hear it, didn't want Sam to say it, to even think it. He swallowed too fizzy, too sweet coke, and then put on a grin halfway between apologetic and rueful. "I didn't lose him to the ice."

That had been the wrong thing to say. Steve realized that the instant the words cleared his lips -- well before Clint's murmured curse and Sam's wide eyed jaw-drop warned him of the error. 

"It's not Barnes either," Natasha put in before Steve could find the words. He cut a glance at her, and she shrugged. "Your words are wrong for him. Nobody you met at the age of twelve would have called you Captain America on first introduction."

"Really?" Sam asked, bringing the bottle of bourbon to the table and perching beside Clint. "Captain America? That's what your bondmark says?"

Steve took a breath, held it, and then nodded, remembering the gentle sorrow in his mother's eyes when she'd taught him how to put the letters on his skin together into words. "Part of it, yeah." He'd been six, he thought, when the first words appeared. The rest hadn't shown up until much, much later. He shook off the memory and glared. "But how did _you_ know about that?"

Natasha shrugged, not looking remotely apologetic. "Coulson told me about it." She cut him a piercing glance, and laid one reassuring hand over the fist he hadn't realized he'd clenched. "He was there when they got you out of the ice, remember."

"So..." Steve swallowed hard, and gave in to the urge to rub at the soreness that lurked under his left collarbone. "So everyone who was there... all those techs and doctors, they saw..."

"No." That was Clint, dead sure and solid as stone. "SHIELD had maybe a dozen Bonded operatives in the whole damn agency, and most all of them were in analytics, where they wouldn't get shot at. Phil and me were the only Bonded field agents Fury had." He shook his head again. "Phil would have been the only person there who could have seen your mark without you showing it, Steve, and Nat and me would have been the only ones he'd ever have told what he saw on you." His lips quirked, mirthlike, but not amused. "At least I like to think he'd have told me if he hadn't decided to fake his death first."

The silence settled, thick and awkward around them, until Sam broke it with a low whistle. "So I guess it makes sense then, how stubborn you were about getting into the army back in the day. Growing up with your rank and callsign on your skin would kinda predispose a guy to sign up."

"I imagine it would be something like having a soulmark that said 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned'," Natasha observed, still gently chaffing her thumb over Steve's knuckles. "It would definitely incline someone toward the church."

"Soulbonded to a Priest." Clint murmured, then shook his head and sing-songed, "Awkward..." 

"Not all priests are Catholic," Sam began.

"Not all Catholic Priests are celibate," Natasha added, a wicked twinkle in her eye.

Another day, Steve would have laughed at the joke -- upped the ante on it, even, but now he couldn't have felt farther from laughter if he'd still been frozen solid. 

"Not all soul bonds are about love." The leaden words cut through the levity instantly, and Steve allowed himself to feel a tiny stab of satisfaction at the shocked expressions left behind. Then he sat upright and made himself behave. "They're not. I've met soulbonded twins before. And a kid whose bonded was a woman older than his grandmother when he met her, and married to boot. She was his schoolteacher, nothing more." He shook his head, warming to his argument. 

"Well that's not to say there wasn't a little bit of - Ow!" Clint rubbed his arm and leaned away from Sam.

"Tesla and Edison were bonded too, weren't they?" Natasha mused. "I'm pretty sure Tom never married Nikolai."

"No they didn't," Sam agreed, still glaring at Clint, "But they still changed the world because of each other. And that's what it's about, right? Changing the world? Now maybe the world in question is one lonely kid who needs someone to kick his ass out of trouble," and there he gestured to Clint, "or a dumbass flyboy who thinks he's ten feet tall and bulletproof," a slap at his own chest, "but the world might also be the size of all those people Riley and me saved, or all the shitty things that never happened because Hawkeye and his man were on the job together." He smiled, unsure, but hopeful as he caught Steve's gaze and held it. "It's about changing the world."

And to that, Steve could do nothing but laugh. And laugh. And laugh. Laugh until his throat scraped with it, till his lungs wrung wheezing tight, and his belly clenched beneath, till his eyes streamed, and his jaw ached, and he thought he might never stop until he was screaming. But he did stop, subsiding to damp chuckles and chagrin just before Natasha had decided to slap him, or Sam went for the oxygen. 

"Oh, we changed it, all right," Steve managed at last. Then before he could think better of it, he pulled his shirt up over his head and turned his left breast to the light, craning his chin aside so the others could see the letters that Fate's twisted sense of humor had inscribed over his heart.

The name was obvious enough, half-scarred with time, and his own restless picking. Captain America -- it could have been said by any of a thousand people who met him for the first time in his uniformed persona. It was the other line though -- the one below it, that hadn't come glimmering through his brand new skin until after he'd stormed into Azanno and rescued his best friend from hell. That one he'd never understood. Never _wanted_ to understand. Until he did understand it, deeply and with horror, and had about an hour left in which to wish he hadn't.

"What makes you so special?" Natasha read the gleaming words aloud, able to see them clearly now that Steve intended her to, able to see the glittering slash of that angry script still aglow after all these years. Not the first words they'd traded -- not just those, but perhaps the most important ones.

Steve answered the question the same way he'd done all his life to anyone who'd asked him anything like it. From schoolyard to alleyway, parking lot to tavern stoop, and even that last time, on his knees in an Alpine fortress, glaring up at a man who must've had that answer shining somewhere on his own skin before his greed and pride had burnt it all away.

"Nothing," Steve said, and did not shiver. "I'm just a kid from Brooklyn."

**Author's Note:**

> Shankyknitter asked for the following in my [Tumblr trope-subversion meme:](http://theactualcluegirl.tumblr.com/post/109441466632/subvert-that-trope-meme)
> 
>  
> 
> _I'm requesting a soulmate AU (preferably the one with the first words from the other written on your skin, but I'm not going to insist on it). Paring is up to you, but preferably one you don't normally write. No Stony, I know you can stretch yourself and have it be awesome._
> 
>  
> 
> And so la. Hope the awesome quotient is up to scratch, m'dear!


End file.
